


No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

by marauders_groupie



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: (yes there are deaths this is a reincarnation au), Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Happy kind of sad, Reincarnation, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Star-crossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 20:37:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5942368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauders_groupie/pseuds/marauders_groupie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They spend their lives searching for each other on the battlefields, in hospitals, bars, and come home just before they have to burn it down to keep someone else warm. Their love is not in the cards, but it's worth fighting for. </p><p>Or: Bellamy and Clarke through various lives. </p><p>Reincarnation AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Grave Can Hold My Body Down

**Author's Note:**

> It took me a lot of time until I finally stopped editing the hell out of this one and decided to post it. I don't know, just like I don't know _how_ it happened. I'm not in control of the muse, right?
> 
> The title is from Hozier - Work Song. 
> 
> Enjoy!

There are names for people like them, people who never get to end together. Star-crossed lovers, soulmates without a soul to hold on to, victims of fate.

They meet at the end of their stories in most of their lives. They don’t get to see streaks of gray in each other’s hair, don’t get to see their grandchildren laughing and some days, they wonder if it’s even worth it – feeling like the whole universe is expanding in your chest but you have to keep travelling, even if you just want to come home.

Bellamy is a heart, a swollen thing, bigger than his body, bigger than his life, and he’s got scars and freckles marking his skin like a boy, like a man.

Most of the time, he is both.

Most of the time, he wants to be none.

Clarke is her brain, her body, the tendons keeping her together even when she feels like shattering. She keeps her head high because it’s all she’s got. She has her head and her two hands and maybe once she thought she could move the world, but now she doesn’t even want to touch it.

At the end of the day, she falls asleep alone, and so it goes.

Lives keep changing, tales keep spinning, only to have them spend their entire lives searching for each other in battlefields, hospitals, bars, and come home just before they have to burn it to keep someone else warm.

They always burn their home on their own. What’s another house lit on fire when their whole bodies still reek of that first smoke?

People like them, the star-crossed lovers, the ones who get to have a love spanning across time and space – but not each other, never each other – they don’t fall asleep, they don’t stop and they can’t think.

It’s not in the cards, it’s not in the galaxies. But it is what it is, and it’s worth it.

 

*

 

In their first life, they are young and the sun is golden in the sky. The heat bats away at their shoulders as they bask in the river, grateful for droplets of water cooling their skin. The world is young and so are they, scraped knees and Clarke’s sun-burned cheeks where Bellamy’s are dark and covered in freckles.

“They look like constellations,” she tells him, her fingertips itching for a piece of parchment to draw his profile on. It should be remembered in history, the beauty of this boy for whom her heart swells more and more with each passing day.

Bellamy wrinkles his nose, frowning as he looks directly at the sun. His mother tells him not to do it, but he always does. What’s the point of having all that beauty right in front of you if you aren’t even going to admire it?

“They look like pox scars.”

Clarke laughs at him because in this life they don’t know pain or suffering and their words know no heat with which you could feel bitter about yourself. “You’re ridiculous.”

His face lights up at her words, his hand where he presses it to the skin of her calf searing hot, much like her body whenever he’s near and Clarke is so young and she knows nothing of the world but she does know everything about Bellamy.

And she loves him, with feather light touches appropriate for souls as young as theirs. They are children and in this life, they never stop being happy.

 

*

 

In the next life, they meet on a street, covered in ash and dust. The ends of Clarke’s hair are charred from the fire, her fingertips are dark and her clothes ripped. Bellamy looks at her in the middle of the chaos that is a revolution and even though he still hasn’t learned her name, his soul recognizes hers and there is nothing he can do to stop himself from rushing to her.

She’s wounded, a deep gash on the skin of her stomach that’s oozing blood. It trickles down her pants, pools at her ankles as she looks around. He knows the sigil she wears emblazoned on her coat and thanks the lucky stars that they are not enemies.

He’d give up his beliefs for her.

“Are you hurt?” he asks and she nods, a quick, curt gesture. When he presses his fingertips to the wound, she flinches but resists what Bellamy thinks must be the urge to break into tears. He would, but she is so much stronger than him.

Instead of weakness, he sees only strength in the way she purses her lips and bites into her cheek as he stitches the ends of her wound together.

“There, that should hold it.”

They speak of nothing for a while but their eyes fall at their rifles, together in the corner, and they smile. It’s a sign, it has got to be – it’s a sign that they are always partners, brothers in arms – through thick and thin their lives will lead them to.

“My name is Clarke,” she finally offers.

“Bellamy.”

The revolution wears them thin, their souls threadbare as the pockets of their coats and their shoes allow the September rains to flow through freely but they have stars in their eyes and they are in love.

Their pockets might let coins fall to the ground but love always fills them anew. No money in the world could buy that.

 

*

 

In their third life, he meets her on his deathbed. Her golden hair doesn’t resemble a halo anymore and he wonders why is it that it seems to become a pattern for them to meet when one of them is wounded.

She recognizes him instantly and he smiles when her eyes widen. They always recognize each other, always walk the streets of their lives hoping to meet – even if they hadn’t yet learned of one another’s existence. Their hearts know. Their hearts _always_ know.

“Sergeant Blake, is that correct?” she asks him, her hands itching to touch him – he knows. His would be doing the same if he could move them. But the bomb blew up too close to him and now blood keeps trickling in his eyes.

But he sees her. God, nothing else matters if he can see her.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No ma’am-ing me, stop that. I feel like I’m a hundred years old. My name is Clarke,” she quips, rolling her eyes fondly as she checks his vitals. The grave look in her eyes she doesn’t manage to hide doesn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already.

He’s dying and it’s as simple as that.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant Blake, there’s not much I can do now.”

But she wants to.

Oh, she wants to.

“That’s fine, Princess. How about you keep me company until I keel over?”

Clarke wrinkles her nose at his obviously distasteful joke but she takes off her neat white hat and sits down next to him. She tells him about all the horrors of the war she’d seen, about how sometimes it feels like death might be better. What are they fighting for if they don’t know how they’ll ever rebuild the world after this?

Bellamy keeps his eyes on her at all times and the sight of her makes the pain ebb away. His dying hour is close by but even Death itself seems to linger at the doorway to give them some more time.

“I’ll let you know what death feels like. My plane for that destination is taking off soon enough.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Send me a postcard, will you?”

With a wheezing, bloody cough, his eyes slide shut and the only thing Clarke will ever manage to remember from the war – the only thing she will keep alive in her memory – is his crooked smile as life left him.

Somehow, he seemed like a man who knew how to find something funny even in the worst tragedy. The real tragedy is that she didn’t get to know him – that he left her before she could find out everything there was about him. She craves those little things – the memories of his first scraped knee, the reason for the scar he has above his upper lip. Does he like coffee or tea? Does he take it with milk or without? Does his laughter sound like the bombs planes overhead drop at them every day? And does his love feel like coming home?

But she’ll never get to know that and for that, she cries until Maya pries her away from the bloodied body. Bellamy Blake.

She keeps the memory of him alive for as long as she lives.

 

*

 

Clarke spends her whole fifth life searching for that one missing piece. She is a doctor, respected by many and she never misses loving someone romantically when she can love her patients, her friends, the whole world. This is what she does because she wants to change it.

It would be a dreadful thing without some love.

But there is always a part of her that pushes her to open her eyes wider as she roams the streets in the late hour after a graveyard shift. There is always a part of her that’s on a lookout for something she can’t name, a feeling of vastness in her chest which was not a person, not an event but the whole universe’s history smashed into one.

She searches and searches, fighting it and finally accepting it only to stop short when the news anchor announces that an asteroid is heading their way and everyone should head to the shelters.

No one can do anything, it is too late. All the telescopes and the satellites didn’t spot it when they should have and now it’s hurtling towards them, a great ball of fire burning up in the atmosphere as Clarke slowly walks to the shelter.

They’re going to be dead anyways, what’s the rush?

And still, she feels as if it’s not her time. Death doesn’t puzzle her, doesn’t worry her – there are worse things. But her heart wants to rip its way out of her ribcage because _no – wait – she has to do something else_.

She doesn’t know what it is until she takes a seat in the shelter by a pair of siblings. She knows it by the way they talk to each other, even if the age difference between them is big.

“I told you to bring snacks, didn’t I, Bell?”

“I’m sorry, O. Next time, okay?”

O raises her eyebrow at her brother, unimpressed. “You expecting another apocalypse?”

Clarke thinks about the pack of Oreos she has in her purse and gets them out, gently tapping _Bell_ on his shoulder. He turns around, visibly surprised and the feeling of panic for losing time in her chest wanes.

His smile is enough to make her forget that they’ll be dead in mere hours. It’s alright. She’s found him.

“I have these,” she says, offering the packet. She doesn’t know why she suddenly thinks of a revolution, of a soldier dying, of a boy with sun-kissed skin on the bank of a river somewhere far, far away. But his face is familiar and his touch is familiar when their fingertips brush as she hands him the Oreos.

“Thank you.”

The comet burns its way towards the ground and it finds the two of them in a shelter, huddled together and laughing as Octavia tells them a joke. Clarke doesn’t know what it’s like to die because she hasn’t even lived until now.

In this life, death is life and life is death. The two love each other with almost the same ferocity as Bellamy and Clarke.

 

*

 

In the sixth life, their love starts a riot.

It is forbidden but Bellamy wraps his arms around her possessively as he speaks, “I don’t give a shit. We belong together, Clarke. And the world can go fuck itself.”

And all because of the crown-shaped mark on her wrist Bellamy teased her about. The man who bears the same mark on the inside of his calf was supposed to be her soulmate but he never gave her anything but pain and heartbreak under the façade of gentleness.

No, Finn never was her soulmate. Not truly, not when she met Bellamy in a coffee shop one day and her soul hummed with finding its rightful partner.

Their love starts a riot and she cries with the anguish of the paradox. Love should never start a riot, love should never be a taboo. What love should be is what she feels in Bellamy – the fierce belonging that nearly rips her heart to shreds with its sheer ferocity.

After a long day, she always crawls back home to him. His lips are her front door, his eyes the windows to the world and his body a house keeping her safe against a torrent.

But they have to fight for their love in this life, fight alongside people like Raven and Monty and Jasper, children who believed in false promises of love being light and easy – and who now know better.

In the end, does it matter if they win or lose? They die together, Clarke crawling to where he’s lying on the street, every move making her bones erupt in flames. But they die together, holding hands as the downpour washes their souls clean.

Bellamy’s eyes never leave her, full of love and longing she felt every single day. And she laughs when he mouths “ _Fuck the world_ ” because this man is a stubborn asshole who loves her more than she will ever know, and whom she loves more than he will ever realize.

They loved each other, and what the hell did anything else matter?

 

*

 

Their lives lose their count – too many of them, time twisting and bending to allow for them to meet, only to rip them apart.

In this life, he is a reckless writer who spends his days wrapped in velvet, his soul dripping with baroque and his heart with romanticism with which he loves passionately. Every morning, he promises to bleed for it because it is worth it.

In this life, Clarke has no patience for men like him and makes sure he knows it. Men always want to subdue her, always want to make her into something she is not, and it is only by a sleight of fate that she ends up his assistant.

“You’re a fool, Bellamy Blake. You speak of ideals and love, as if you knew anything about them!”

In every life, it is as if she is the head and he is the heart. Her mind is the hurricane and his heart the bleeding thing in the middle of the room, screaming in pain and shouting whispers – begging to be felt and admired.

_Look at how strong I am, look at how wholesomely I break._

“Miss Griffin, you know what I’m capable of. You know what I’ve done. But I chose to be kind instead of furious at what the world gave me.”

Clarke knows how much his writing makes him suffer, knows the sound of his back cracking after a night he spent hunched over his papers. She knows him inside and out, knows that he prefers red to white wine and knows how much he loves his sister.

She even knows of the war that forced him to kill so he wouldn’t be killed. Bellamy never speaks of it but she sees it in the way his eyes soften when he sees children in the streets, blessedly unaffected by all the horrors he had seen.

And so she smiles at him and he pours them wine in skulls fashioned into glasses, their life now velvet, satin and decadence but there is something so inherently pure in his soul that Clarke can’t stop looking at this man.

He is a fool but he is a fool whom she wants desperately. Her bones are hollow from not touching him and when he finally pulls her into the plush armchair, his dearest possession – more of a throne than a chair, her soul exhales.

“A fool, am I, Miss Griffin?” he smirks, his hands heavy on tops of her thighs, burning through the cotton which now seems thin compared to the heat eating them alive.

His eyes darken and her breath hitches when he turns them over, sliding to his knees on the hardwood floor. It feels as if her soul is bared in front of him and really, Clarke wouldn’t have it any other way.

His hands glide over her calves, rucking up her skirts as they make their way to her heat and it’s burning, it’s burning so much that it’s almost a morbid symphony of this decadent writer pressing his lips to the apex of her thighs and mouthing only one thing into her sensitive skin.

_“Princess.”_

Her neck is bared to the ceiling, eyes widen open and lips parted in surprise when his chuckle is enough to make her see stars.

Bellamy kneels in front of her like a worshipping zealot and she loves him, has loved him all through this life and knows that there was no other way the two of them could have ended up than the way they are now -

Bellamy on his knees, offering her the world and Clarke taking it because she always gives and she’s tired of feeling hollow.

 

*

 

In the next life, she is his commander and she sends him to die for her. The war is taking its toll on the people, long lines in front of small, barely stocked shops, children crying far away from the front, but. They are still suffering, the same as her men and women are.

The desert is nothing but dust and sand, and their lives seem like nothing more than sand endlessly trickling to the bottom of the hourglass. They may turn it over when they escape a close call but there will come a time when their luck runs out.

And so she summons him, sitting in her tent and worrying her lower lip as he walks in. Bellamy Blake, her most trusted adjutant, her partner in this living hell.

“Take a seat, Bellamy.”

“Cut the crap, Clarke. We need to attack, don’t we?”

They’ve been holding off the enemy for far too long, while it has been advancing on the other side of their country and their shoulders can’t bear it anymore. Their souls can’t bear it anymore.

Somehow, it is always the two of them that end up carrying the burden.

Clarke sighs, leaning back into her chair and averting her gaze from the bloodstain on her trousers. Her uniform is dirty, but it’s her soul that feels the filthiest.

“We need to attack.”

He nods, finally taking the offered seat as he takes off his hat. His curls bounce wildly, inky black and eternally messy. She tried to get him to cut them off and he’d hissed that he’d rather die than do that. Bellamy is a man of his principles.

“You want me to lead the attack?”

“I _need_ you to lead the attack,” she sighs, the warmth making humidity pool in her collarbone, soaking her shirt through and through. It’s so warm and she knows it’s hell, knows it by the way they bring men into the medical at the end of the day and she knows that there were families waiting for them to come back. “I hate it, but you’re our only chance if we want to win this.”

In this life, she is his commander and he does what she says. There is a small part of her heart that suspects there is something else in the midst, something she can only see vaguely in split-seconds when his eyes soften looking at her, when he holds a hand to the small of her back as she falters, body collapsing with exhaustion.

In every life, they are friends and partners and lovers, but in this life they never get to be anything more than partners because Bellamy is lying in the sand, limbs at awkward angles, a broken body that’s bleeding out for her.

They won the war but she lost.

God, she lost so bad and her heart beats at her chest, demanding to be let out and kick the shit out of her because she sent the man she loves to die.

“Bellamy, I am so, so sorry,” she whispers, carding her fingers through his hair. He leans into the touch, coughing up blood that seems to be fucking everywhere against the beige backdrop.

They love each other and she hadn’t remembered it until just now.

“It’s alright, Princess,” he assures her, voice calm in all of this violence. The enemy surrendered with a bloody flag, the tanks are returning back to the base, and she still feels like they’re fighting a war. “We won.”

“Fuck that, fuck that, Bellamy! Fuck the whole country!”

“Not a way for a princess to talk.”

“Cocky bastard,” she whispers, fond, as the tears streaming down her cheeks now fall to the front of his shirt. The blood thins, brown turning into red, and he lifts a hand to her cheek.

They could have had time, they could have done so much had they been any smarter.

Clarke always thought that love was a weakness, ever since her mentor, her lover, Lexa let her down gently with those words. “Love will be the death of us, Clarke. Let us live a little longer.”

But God, love is not weakness, love is not a whisper but a shout echoing across the fabric of universe, rustling space and time and it is the highest bravery Clarke can think of.

Love is what being strong means. Love is what it means to fight to live another day.

“Tell Octavia I love her, alright?”

Clarke nods fervently. “Of course, I’ll – I’ll take care of her, don’t worry.”

“And, Clarke?” His eyes look so earnest and young, despite all the horrors of the war he’d seen. They’ve been fighting wars throughout time and history but they could never win the one which mattered the most. “Please don’t cry for me.”

His voice breaks as he breathes out the last word and she cries and cries and cries, knowing that this is the second time she’d seen him die. It always comes back in their last moments, the flickers of who they were, the flickers of who they would be – without a rhyme or reason, just the endless shifting in time and space around them, making them search and making them find.

The world doesn’t love them but at least they love each other. Not even death could keep them away.

 

*

 

In their most precious life, they are Bellamy and Clarke from the Ark space station and they fight side by side. They go through hell to get to heaven and when the ranks close in around them, they are bruised and bloodied but they are grinning like it’s what they’ve been waiting for forever.

“You take the left, I’ll take the right,” she tells him and he grins, feeling blood trickle down his chin. Oh, they are going to die, no doubt about it, but they never go down without a fight.

It’d be nothing like them not to bring at least twenty others with them.

“Let’s go kick some Grounder ass, Princess.”

And she beams at him – she fucking _beams_ at him with her left eye swollen shut and more bruises than he can count. In this life, they’re counting bruises rather than kisses and it’s the fight that fuels their hearts, making them bigger than this life they’re leading.

They are Bellamy and Clarke and they are nothing if not co-leaders, lovers without a lover.

The Grounders get in closer and he grins, always grins, and she beams like she does when he’s near these days.

“Oh, and Clarke?”

She turns to face him, finger twitching on the trigger of her rifle. There’s so much hope in her eyes, even as they slowly walk to face death for the final time.

“You should know that I fucking love you.”

Their kiss almost stops death, but just almost. It’s not written in the stars but Bellamy doesn’t mind because she’s smiling at him as they lie on the ground.

For the first time, blood doesn’t feel like violence. It feels like a promise of a better world. Maybe their people will mix their ashes so they can be together in death, like Achilles and Patroclus – the stories about whom his mother had read to him.

And maybe no ashes will remain, but whatever happens – he’s had her for a second.

And she will always have him.

 

*

 

“No, but listen to me,” she tells him, eyes wide and pleading, hands that are gripping his wrists too weak for his pulse. He is alive, his heart is still beating and it doesn’t matter that the world is ripping itself at the seams. It’s hard for anything to matter when he’s looking at her and his soul is looking at hers.

“What if we’re too late in this life but what if we make it in the next? What if we never end and what if we always find each other?”

He smiles, the way he always smiles when he wants to believe, but he is Atlas and he’s tired of carrying the world on his shoulders. His heart may be too frail to carry some more hope but he’s going to try.

He’s going to try and she sees it in the small hope woven in his smile, the gleam in his eyes when he looks at her.

“You think we’re infinite?”

“You and I, Bellamy Blake,” she whispers, pressing her forehead to his, hot skin to hot skin as ice engulfs everything around them, “yeah, I’d bet my life on it.”

They go down with this ship, cracking in the ice of a planet far away, where there is no life. Space explorers will find their bodies in a hundred years, maybe two hundred, and it won’t matter. They’ve given their best to each other.

They’ve given their best to the world.

 

*

 

They are children, they are adults, they are elderly who meet days before their departure in a sunlight-filled room and it always feels like coming home.

Their hearts are ripped to shreds throughout their various lives, smashes against glass and shattering like very precious things shatter – softly, quietly, enough to bring the whole world down.

Death and life intertwine them, set them on a same path that, although it curves and flattens, always brings them together in the end.

And whatever may have happened and whatever that is still in their future as they dance in front of the TV, one completely ordinary night save for the two of them drunk on red wine and the love they hold for each other in their hearts, they will find one another.

Always.

Because it is a choice and it is a promise. Because it may not make sense, but because it is the only thing their hearts deem worthy. To love so much your souls dance on the precipice between an Earth-shattering explosion and a song slow enough to make your blood turn into wine.

They will find each other because it is very easy to die for what you believe in. The hardest thing, really, is to live and fight for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for reading! I'm sorry that this is sad, especially after e03, but I hope it didn't devastate you a lot. 
> 
> If you liked it, please let me know - kudos & comments are a great way to do that. :D
> 
> p.s. my [trash can](http://marauders-groupie.tumblr.com) is super comfortable, you should all join me.


End file.
